Competency
dence of his competency.
“The victim in the sex assault said to me, ‘ How can he be incompetent when he watched me for days before the rape?‘” prosecutor Joshua Nathaniel said in court.
“How can he be incompetent when he picked her up, a person with no legs and a malformed arm, and he raped her? How can he be incompetent when he did this for an hour, laid on top of her to where she’s not able to scream?’ ”
He went on to argue that Luke was faking his disability and asked Brody to reverse her prior finding that Luke was permanently incompetent. Juba later called the district attorney’s position “dishonest and disingenuous.”
“( They’re claiming) every single doctor is wrong, and not only is ( Luke) not incompetent, he is so sophisticated and smart and he is able to trick every medical professional who has ever evaluated him,” Juba said in an interview. “That position is crazy.”
But Juba also doesn’t want to see the criminal case dismissed and Luke dropped from the system with nothing. The 21- day window was not enough time to connect him to care.
“If we can’t incarcerate a child who is not competent, and the statute doesn’t allow him to be civilly committed, then what do you do? What is that middle ground? The remedy in this exact situation?” he said. “There has to be some sort of middle ground between just kicking him out and putting him on the streets with nothing, vs. you are locked behind locked doors and barbed wire.”
At the end of the Oct. 26 hearing, Brody extended the 21- day stay on Luke’s dismissal for an additional 120 days, and she sent him back to the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo.
Juba and a social worker on the defense team have since scrambled to connect Luke to a longerterm placement, a task that falls into no man’s land. It’s not technically part of Juba’s duties as Luke’s attorney, but it’s no one else’s job to figure it out either.
“If I wasn’t the one doing all this, it wouldn’t be done,” Juba
said. “... There should be a mechanism where the court appoints someone to act in this capacity.”
And finding a placement is easier said than done. Colorado’s civil inpatient capacity is “precariously low,” the special masters wrote in the November report.
“No amount of diversion, community programs or other outpatient alternatives will ever meet the needs of all Colorado’s mentally ill population,” the report reads.
“Ultimately, the long- term solution to Colorado’s competency crisis will require a strong civil system that can manage the mental health needs of people with minor charges, reserving the criminal court competency system for defendants with serious charges.”
Released into homelessness
A civil commitment didn’t help Patrick Holten escape the competency cycle.
In spring 2022, Patrick was found incompetent to proceed in the 2021 menacing case in which he was accused of threatening his neighbor.
A Denver judge dismissed the criminal charges against him,
and he was transferred to a state mental health hospital for involuntary care under a civil commitment.
For about a year, Patrick received involuntary care. But in April, authorities at the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Fort Logan decided to discharge Patrick, finding that he no longer met the criteria to be held for involuntary treatment.
They dropped him off at an Aurora homeless shelter on April 10 over the objections of his parents and attorney.
“Patrick has continued to voice his desire to return to homelessness and his unwillingness to engage with any treatment options or discharge planning that have been offered,” the hospital’s discharge notes read.
Diane and Charles Holten tried to meet Patrick at the homeless shelter, but hospital staff members could not tell them what time Patrick would be dropped off, and they missed him.
Still they tracked him down that day, found him on Colfax Avenue, got him a food stamp card, a driver’s license, a cellphone.
“They discharged him without medication, without any services in place, nothing in place,”
Diane said.
“Not even a recommendation for a psychiatrist. Absolutely nothing.”
Releasing people into homelessness is an indictment of the state’s mental health system, said Rep. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat, who has pushed for reform in the mental health system.
“When you get cancer, nobody says you should be homeless,” she said.
Within a month of the discharge, Patrick was beaten up by someone on the street, suffering a broken nose and cheekbones. Alerted by Aurora police because they had filed a missing persons report, Patrick’s parents met him in the emergency room, and Diane begged Patrick to come home. He wouldn’t.
She went back out and found him on the street that night, tried to give him a bag of frozen peas to help with the swelling.
And then, on May 18, Patrick was arrested on charges he threw rocks through the windows of a Ross Dress for Less in Aurora and walked toward a man with an open pocket knife, according to an affidavit.
Patrick was talking to a wall when the officer arrived.
Now, Patrick is back in the Arapahoe County Detention Center. A psychologist found him incompetent to proceed in June, and he’s back in a holding pattern, just another of more than 400 people waiting in jail for inpatient competency restoration treatment.
“I’m still speechless that they just dropped him off like that,” Diane Holten said.
“Because now he’s back in jail, and we have to go through this whole system again.”
A spokeswoman for the Office of Civil and Forensic Mental Health, Jordan Saenz, said the office could not comment on a particular patient’s case.
But she said in a statement that if a patient no longer meets the criteria for involuntary treatment, the state hospitals cannot hold them: “Our team works closely with every type of family to ensure an easy transfer back into the community, but, at the end of the day, patients are allowed to make decisions for themselves, and we cannot interfere.”
Patrick should not have been discharged into the community, said Zachary Schlichting, an attorney for the Holten family.
“Despite their determination that he wasn’t a threat to himself or others, he got both injured and arrested and went right back into the criminal system,” he said “They have just dropped the ball over and over and over again.”